Dutch Speculaas cookies in large handcarved wooden molds. It's a very stiff dough. You have to really whack it out of the molds. Too much work and not a good result. I'll just appreciate them even more when I can buy them from a bakery in Holland.

seagrass

Well, I did make a lemon custard/meringue based cake for Chrystal's birthday one year that took about 10 hours total and was definitely not worth the time....

Truthfully, though, it's got to be duck. In any incarnation it's challenging. If it's roasted until the skin is crispy it can be dry or stringy, if the skin isn't crispy it's thick and greasy, and if it's not precooked a bit it's greasy in cassoulet. Just challenging altogether and expensive enough that I really don't want to compromise the quality of the final dish by incorrectly cooking it.

Annie

If by challenging you mean: not worth the time and effort, then I might have to say tamales. They were very labor intensive, and now I tend to buy them rather than make them. Napoleons were a bit of a challenge when I first made them because of all the resting time for the puff pastry, and the chocolate turtles I made in the Madeleine mold were also labor intensive, but neither were really challenging. I might need to give tamales another go, however. I would enjoy it more if I had help. Making falafel using fresh fava beans was also a bit of a challenge, but now I use soaked dried beans that have not been fully cooked.

I've never successfully made my own sourdough starter, and so that's a challenge that I have yet to conquer!

Lars

No doubt it was petit fours for me as well. I only made them once in 1978 for a baby shower I was giving. -Grainlady

Bread. I just can't seem to get the "feel" for the dough and my loaves always turn into doorstops.

Croissants, on the other hand came easy for me.....go figure.

Linda

A blue cheese walnut appetizer....James beard recipe as I recall....the filling was not a problem, but I made the pastry from scratch. Physically challenging to roll and book fold and have the butter at just the right coldness and then repeat and again!!
It was delicious but Oh! The labor! I have never done it again now I just buy puff pastry.
Linda C

Curry. I worked at making a passable curry for years before decent curry paste became available in this area. Those dark days of crushing allspice and cloves, cumin and tumeric... some were decent but all lacked something.

Hassenpheffer was a challenge.... start by raising a rabbit....

: )
lyra

The first challenging thing that came to mind was a dove pie I made.....once.

Not hard, picture a chicken pot pie but with dove breast meat in it. The challenging part came from the god-awful smell of that meat! It was hard to stay in the kitchen while simmering the meat, it was hard to stay in the house, I absolutely could not eat any of that dove pie for dinner! It even stunk up the house for days after! We had friends for dinner that night and they all loved the dove pie. Don't know what I ate that night, must have been salad and bread, but NO WAY was I going to eat that stuff after smelling it all day.

Teresa - who never made another dove pie to this day!

Anything with dough challenges me. Pie crust is hard enough, I would never branch out into anything with puff pastry, croisants and the like. Strudel, nope. Homeade pasta, nope. I love phyllo but I find it very challenging.

I would like to make more British style quick breads but I find them challenging. There are a lot of them that you cook on a burner over the stove. Things like bannock, oatcakes, Irish soda bread. Properly done they are great comfort food, but I don't have much of a knack.

Like Lars, I would like to get into sourdough, as it is my favorite type of bread, but I don't know if my haphazard work lifestyle will accomodate it. So far I've managed bread with a 14 hour biga, but honestly I didn't find it all that much different than standard yeast bread.

I think if it was a expensive item like the duck Annie said that it would probably intimidate me too much. I don't like expensive ingredients because of that. Also, croissants is on my to do list and I wanted to last week but just didn't. Deep frying is another thing I am very bad at and will always be a challenge as I never let the oil get hot enough as it scares me too much. Anything I have ever made tastes like fish. And no, not because I had fried fish in the same oil because I have never made fried fish. Donuts = fish. Chicken = fish. Fried pies = fish. I have to say my eggrolls turn out though. I should make fish one day. Maybe it will taste like chicken? And Grainlady, I would have hated to be in a committed position with the petit fours. I wouldn't have been able to finish.

2 things come to mind, first Puerto Rican Pasteles, sort of a Caribbean Tamale. Hubby loves them and I was all excited to make them for him. After the first two hours, that excitement decreased considerably. :o) Once all the filling has been prepared (a two day process), they are also double-wrapped, first in Banana leaves, and then tied in parchment paper. The recipe did make a lot, so we had lots to freeze and hubby got his daily pastele fix for weeks. :o)

Second thing, Baumkuchen. Very labor intensive, 16 thin cake layers baked one on top of the other in a springform pan. And though it tasted good, it just wasn't worth all the work.

Well, having many dishes hot and ready at the same time is usually my biggest challenge: dinner parties, holidays, big church events, etc.

But the most challenging single dish I make is yogurt. I am on a quest to copy Oikos caramel Greek yogurt at home and so far, have not arrived.

I'm sure I've blocked that completely out of my mind!

Sourdough bread. I have had success with starters. I've also had success making the bread itself. But I simply cannot get motivated enough for the regular feeding of the starter. I forget about it, and don't care enough to remember to feed it. So weeks will go by, then I'll force myself to get it out of the fridge & feed it. I'll get it going, make some bread, and promptly forget about it again.

I guess the real reason is that I'm not a huge fan of sourdough bread to begin with. I don't care much for the overly sour flavor. I thought sourdough would be great to add flavor to lower sodium breads, but I still can't seem to get motivated enough to feed the starter regularly.

I finally gave up about a month ago and trashed my starter. I got tired of looking at it and feeling guilty.

I think more in terms of "time consuming" vs. challenging. For me it is definitely the gingerbread houses I make (almost) yearly. Lots of time and thought go into them, and I can easily spend a week on a single house. But not really challenging, just busy work.
Making homemade candy is far more challenging given the fickleness of humidity and other factors.

I find Pad Thai very challenging. It's very difficult to get the whole thing is a mess. Sticky noodles, gloppy sauce, and zero resemblance to the restaurant dish!
cookie8, that whole =fish thing cracked me up!!

Oh no Petra. I was planning on making a 12 layer cake today or tomorrow for my husband's birthday! Maybe I'll visit a fancy bakery instead. I am a little cake decorated out right now. Yesterday, I figured I wouldn't give up on my petit fours and made 20 more. I used just one colour. It was a little easier like that but my back is killing me.

Strudel was the most challenging for me. Stretching that ball of dough until it was tissue thin and covered the entire kitchen table was not easy. I'm sure skill comes with practice but I only tried it once.

Napoleons and sourdough starter are challenges I share with others here but neither has been quire so difficult as strudel.

Jim

Decorating cakes, cookies and cupcakes is the most challenging thing to me. Perhaps I just don;t have the eye and I surely don;t have the patience!!

I don't do fiddly well.

When I was about 17, my cousin and I tackled a very old recipe to make a Tulip Cake (aka Morning Glory Cake, Band Cake, Ice Cream Cone Cake, Cornucopia Cake) for our grandmother's birthday. It was a delicate sponge cake batter baked in thin layers. Each layer was cut into quarters and rolled into a cone shape with the large edge dipped into icing and colored sprinkles, and then the cones arranged in round layers of descending size with the wide parts facing outwards. There were about 50 cones in the cake tower!

It took a whole day for us to make it and the cake quarters had to be a certain temperature to hold their shape so we had a lot of cone rejects and had to make a second batch of batter, which used 9 or 10 eggs. The end result was really beautiful. My grandmother and great-aunt hadn't seen a tulip cake since they were little girls and it prompted a fascinating round of stories about 4th of July town picnics and the foods everyone brought.

In later years, two things that come to mind are ladyfingers (sift, sift, sift) and consomme. It took a number of tries until I mastered the consomme "rafts" but in that case, the end result is so worth the time and trouble.

I know there are other things that may have required more steps/time, but 2 came right to mind.

1. The Sticky Bun recipe that the owner of Flour Bakery makes. I was watching the Food Network when she won a Bobby Flay "Throwdown" with them. Seemed like hours on end of multiple steps till they were done. They were really good, but I've had just-as-good with less effort.

2. Fresh Corn & Lobster Chowder from the Barefoot Contessa. I made this on a very hot day last summer for guests who were coming for dinner. It seemed like it took forever to to boil the lobster, shell them, shuck & cook the corn, make the stock, drain everything, then make the cream base for the chowder......It was delicious, but I remember lifting a lot of heavy pots and creating a lot of steam while working in a hot kitchen all day.

I tried to make Julia Child's version of French bread, using her method of flipping and whacking the bread instead of kneading it. I gave up and threw the dough out!

I actually have never made the following because it looks too complicated. It is probably the petit four version of pasta. It is in an old cookbook I have.

Here is a link that might be useful: beehive pasta timbale

Cookie, what recipe were you going to make? What made the Baumkuchen so difficult is that each thin layer is broiled on top of the other in the springform pan. So you pour in a thin layer of dough, broil it (keeping an eagle eye so it does not get too brown), then take out the pan and add another thin layer and broil, repeat and repeat and repeat. It does make a very pretty presentation, but once was enough. :o)

At age 12 I was adept at making pate a choux into cream puffs and eclairs. Challenging but fun for me then because we lived out in no-where-ville without kids my age, and it was before we had a TV, so my mom let me bake anything I wanted to try. (She was a plain cook and never baked, the rest of us craved sugar anything.)

In my 20-somethings, I decided to make the tower thing of profiteroles, or croquembouche. The puffs were fine, but the sticky, gooey, yucky honey syrup all over them was truly awful, tasted terrible, dribbled in a mass at the bottom and over the edges of the plate, and none of my guests wanted to "disturb" the display. I was totally humbled and embarrassed by that disaster and it was years and years before I made any more pate a choux, and about that long before I would eat honey. I found out many years later that it was supposed to be covered with spun sugar, not honey. I've never tried making spun sugar, because the embarrassment still lingers, 40 years later.

Nancy

Petit fours for me. I was in my mid twenties the first time and vowed I would never make them again. They were quite lovely to look at but such a pain. About 15 years later I belonged to a gourmet luncheon group and they decided to have a 'mad hatter' tea party and wanted petit fours. I helped make them and the whole time I was thinking "now I remember why I said I would never make these again". Number 2 on my list would be Veal Prince Orloff from Julia Child's cookbook. Once again it was for a Gourmet group (dinner) and I got conned into filling in for the hostess. When I received the recipe in the mail it was FOUR pages long. I used every pot in the cupboard several times and it took three days prep. It was good but I could name many main dishes that take an hour or so and are equally as good if not better! That one I've never made again, but I kept the recipe just in case someone doesn't believe me when I tell them it was four pages long LOL.

Bread.

I'm not used to making something 20 times and still being dissatisfied at the result. Very interesting, very humbling.

I want to quit my job, sell my things, don sackcloth rags, and apprentice myself to a harsh old baker in a small French village. After 10 years of pain and toil, I hope to finally make the loaf that I see in my mind's eye. The crust as brittle as icicles, boldly slashed and voluptuously risen, the inside chewy, faintly salty, riven through with holy void.

Oh well. Back to making Wonder Bread.

A Croquembouche for my Mom's 70th birthday, and a wedding cake for a paying customer.
When my Mom was about to turn 70, I offered to cater a big party for her, which she took me up on. Asking her what sort of cake she would like, she replied, "I've always wanted a Croquembouche." My heart sank (I'd made one before). But a promise is a promise, so I baked all the profiteroles and took them, the pastry cream filling and all the sugar-making paraphernalia to Mom's house, along with all the other food.
Started assembling it. As it turned out, each batch of toffee for the sticking together phase went off very quickly so I had to make several batches and work fast while in the "sweet spot" (sorry about the pun). Mom remarked, "If I had known how much work it would be I wouldn't have asked for one." I figured it made up for all the times I insisted on a scratch cake instead of a box cake for my birthday :-) And I'm glad I did it because Mom got her wish, and it was the last really good birthday she had.
The wedding cake had me so wound up I wanted to throw up. A friend who caters called me in a panic and said she was catering a wedding and had just realised (three days before the wedding) she wasn't going to have time to make the cake too, so would I do it? The happy couple had a specific recipe they had chosen from a Martha Stewart magazine. The cake was enormous. I had to scale it way up for the batches, it was five tiers, each tier 4 layers, from 14" to 6".
My house was covered with cooling cakes. The layers were meant to be filled with a layer of the special lemon buttercream, then a layer of lemon curd. Made quarts of both. Started filling. As it turns out, buttercream and lemon curd are sworn enemies and want nothing to do with each other. As soon as I started putting the layers together on the smallest cake they started sliding apart in several directions. The 6" layer I could just hold together with one hand long enough to get the four layers together, then skewer it to hold it in place. The 8" layer I was not so lucky with. A large chunk broke off one layer, no way that could be fixed so I quickly had to bake another cake. Time is rushing on and the caterer was coming to pick up the cake that evening and I didn't have the option of saying, "well, sod it." I was almost in tears. My husband offered to buy take away food for dinner, I told him "just get something for yourself, I really could not eat right now, I think I'd be sick".
Looking closely at the photographs of Martha Stewart's cake, I can see no sign of lemon curd. I would bet the original cake had none, someone thought it would be a good idea post-production. (It's not.) That's it. No more lemon curd. Fortunately the rest of the assembly went reasonably smoothly, though the largest layers were tricky to place without breaking them (tip: use a thin cardboard sheet to pick them up and then slide them off to where you want them to be). The bottom layer assembled weighed a ton due to sheer size.
As I staggered to the caterer's car with it I told her, "put this exactly where you want it before you add the other layers, because once this baby's together the Hulk won't be shifting it".
The bride was set on the Martha Stewart topper, a branch of a lemon tree with two lemons growing on it, dipped in egg white and rolled in yellow coloured sugar. Only problem was, lemons on branches were not in season. I have a lemon tree, so I cut off a suitable branch, bought two lemons and bored holes in the stem ends, inserted lemon twigs. A bit of hot glue, hide with yellow sugar and Bob's your uncle :-) Looked real ;-)
Didn't get to see it assembled, hoped I had enough dowels in to prevent it telecoping like one of those skyscrapers you see them imploding, and apparently all was well.
Charged like a wounded bull for it as well, bride and groom loved it so all worked out OK but never again.

Ravioli from scratch, would be one of mine. Messy, and took a long time, and then most of them fell apart in the water. :-( Next time, I would make them bigger so there wouldn't be so many to make.

My other one would be puff pastry. Not difficult, just time-consuming and ultimately not worth it. Much more worthwhile to focus my efforts elsewhere.

I would say mine was something similar to the Baumkuchen mentioned above, except my recipe called for layers to be painted onto a turning spit, which my old oven just happened to have. One layer was cake, the next apricot jam... and on and on. I don't remember how many layers there were but the whole came out as a cylinder about 12 inches long andf 6 inches in diameter. It was excellant and well worth the effort. I only made it the once since I've never had a rotisery in any other oven.

I don't know if it was this exact recipe or not, however it was close and I didn't have the biryani flower and one of the other ingredients. I had eaten Chicken Biryani in an Indian restaurant and the taste practically took my breath away it was so delicious. I tried it in another restaurant and it was rather tasteless and too hot from all of the hot pepper. I found many recipes, many of them easy, however I could tell from the list of ingredients most were not like what I had eaten. A long list of ingredients doesn't scare me at all. It was the methods and the complicated recipe that was off putting, then it wasn't very good after all of that work.

Here is a link that might be useful: Hyderabadi Chicken Biryani

I made turkey tetrazinni (SP?) out of Thanksgiving leftovers. Looked simple, but lots of steps and TONS of stirring the sauce. It came out tasting merely ok, nothing special. Also had a hard time making a Cajun dish from Paul Prudhomme's cookbook. Lots of steps, lots of chopping.Also, DH never gives compliments. Food is "OK" or "fine" at best. And he's liberal with criticisms- too salty, next time use white pepper,etc.His mother was the same way. (Just had to get a dig in).

Who doesn't love baklava? It was my biggest challenge. The filling was a snap but the phyllo dough was so difficult to separate and keep intact while not drying the rest of the unused sheets. (Finally did that with a damp towel.) Buttering layer after layer created an oil slick on my counter. Wish I had thought ahead to get ALL tools and pans out at before I began. I didn't and that meant stopping to wash my hands each time I needed to touch a knob. End product was delicious but I'll never make it again. Afterward I phoned my sister and asked "Did you ever make baklava?" She laughed so hard and so long I finally had to hang up and call her later. Turns out her experience was about 50 years ago (she's 12 years older than I and I was too young to care about kitchen stories.) so I had never heard about her experience... it was the SAME as mine! What a mess!

I love making some of my mother's old recipes. Most of the time they turn out fine; however, last year I attempted to make szilvas gomboc (aka Hungarian plum dumplings). The dumpling dough is made from mashed potatoes and my dough was good. The topping is bread crumbs and butter with a little cinnamon and my topping was good. But somehow I screwed up in a major way and didn't buy freestone Italian prune plums which I now understand are the right plums for this recipe. I bought these plums that insisted on keeping their pits and as I ripped the pits out, the plums got so mangled and ugly and wet but I still shoved them into the dough which then got sticky plum juice on the outside of the dumpling which turned into a mess. But I still didn't give up and I boiled those suckers and because I got plum juice all over the place, the dough didn't adhere to the plums and as they were simmering they fell apart. So after about three hours messing with them I did finally give up. I will try them again this fall with the right plums. I remember them being absolutely delicious and I refuse to let a plum beat me down.

Westelle, what you made WAS Baumkuchen!! Well, except for the jam. :o)
The traditional way is to make it on a spit, layer after layer over an open fire, but I did not have a spit or an open fire, so the springform pan method was a work around to get the layered look. In Germany, you can sometimes watch the Baumkuchen being made in Bakeries, very interesting to watch.

Petra: No Apricot Jam?! The carmelized jam between each layer of cake was sooooo delicious.

I wonder if I could make one on my grill spit?

The finished cake is sometimes glazed with apricot jam, but I've never heard of putting it between each cake layer. Since the cake is made on a rotating spit, I bet you could make a smaller version on your grill spit!

Strudel. Pardon the language, but I truly suck at it, and subsequent attempts did not improve my dough results. (I always feel like I'm confessing when I discuss my dough failures.)

Almost anything with yeast. Sometimes I have success but often not. And I have rarely ever tried making piecrusts. I used to say that's why God made Pillsbury etc. I even failed the summer torte...caught my oven on fire the first time and wasn't pleased with the results the second time. As of today there hasn't been a third.

What can I say...I'm a failure at baking or as I told Bob, I guess I'm a wannabe baker.

jude

Absolutely, dried meat. I don't know what I was thinking:) It was totally a failure.

When I was a teenager, I made a "Spanische Windtorte." The picture of it was so pretty, and it sounded wonderful. It is an Austrian dessert composed of meringue filled with cream. You pipe meringue in a close spiral and bake it for the bottom, easy enough. Then you have to pipe and bake many rings, which you layer up from the bottom and glue with unbaked meringue to form a round box. Then you do another close spiral for a lid. The inside is filled with whipped cream flavored with cognac and fresh strawberries. After carefully placing the "lid" on top, the outside is decorated with piped whipped cream and candied violets.

It wasn't that it was difficult, exactly, it's just that it was seriously time consuming, handling the brittle meringue rings was troublesome, and decorating had to be very quick so that one could serve the dessert before the inside cream began to melt. I had to make my own candied violets as well, which didn't help. It was very pretty, but when it came to eating it you might do just as well with a bowl of strawberries & whipped cream by crumbling a few meringue cookies on top. All that work and so little gustatory umph.

I don't know why I came up with the idea of doing this for my daughter's baptism instead of just making the full cake, I decided to make individual princess cakes and they really were too sweet imo and took ~8hrs of my time that I could have used for something else. Just doing the cake would have been baking time +30 min so I really did things the hard way.

Here is a pic of them:
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TIRAMISU! Last week, I made tiramisu for my birthday, from the California Pizza Kitchen recipe. I am certain it used every bowl I owned, eacg step required chilling, so it took all day, and I think the rum measurement was off, because when I was FINALLY done, it was inedible. Never again! My son works at a restaurant that makes it, so it will become one of those things that I must have when I eat out, because I can't make it at home!

Ruthanna, I was so intrigued by your grandmother's Tulip Cake, that I Googled for pictures & finally found one under Morning Glory Cake from a blog called Chronicles of Thyme.
What an undertaking!

Here is a link that might be useful: A Morning Glory Cake

What fun to find a local cookbook by reading the cooking forum. Thanks, Kathleen. I'm very surprised that there is a "Boyertown Area Cookbook." Boyertown is tiny. I'd never think of there being a "Boyertown area." (I live about half an hour away.)
Very interesting that Ruthanna knew this cake in her family. Tulip cake or morning glory cake, it's not something I knew about. I must ask around. It may be very local, more in Ruthanna's county and spreading down into mine in the -yes- Boyertown area.

I have baked and cooked for years, but have not, for some reason, been able to master a homemade angel food cake. I must have a heavy hand...all of my butter-based cakes are lovely...however, that darn angel food slays me every time! I sift and sift and sift..am so very careful to sloooowly add the cake flour/sugar....bam. Every time. It doesn't taste bad, just doesn't become the beautiful, high and queenly angel food of pictures. What the heck? Also, danish pastry is kind of a pain....time consuming to the max. Guess I'll stick with Cream Puffs, Eclairs, and cheesecake for the fun stuff....sheesh.

I have to confess I did a lot of googling on a lot of the products made. I couldn't find the tulip cake so I'm glad Kathleenca added a link. I feel too guilty to make an angel food cake. I have a hard time using half an egg for some reason. Next time I make creme brulee I should make an angel food cake along with it!
Cute little cakes btw. I should have posted a pic of my petit fours but I'm never on my husband's computer where all the pics are.